Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture allows for the distribution of hypermedia within the constraints of existing standard web-based protocols and encoding for existing operations. REST architecture is, in essence, a hybrid programming style derived from various network-based architectural styles as well including a uniform connector interface. REST includes the four interface constraints of identification of resources, manipulation of resources through representations, self-descriptive messages, and hypermedia as the application state.
REST web services provide easier and intuitive interfaces that ease the development of applications interacting with the service. Although, it is important when providing these features for the active monitoring of quality of the transmission of the transactions. It is typical for parties to have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that define various factors associated with the services provided for potential service consumers and it is important to monitor various factors associated with the transactions to ensure conformity with the correspond SLAs, such as to monitor the availability of access to the requested data and the response time in which a data request (e.g. requesting a resource representation) is answered.
Additionally related to monitoring resources and services are fault handling operations. The quality and effectiveness of REST web services can be very important in commercial grade web service APIs, therefore it is very important to not only monitor the REST web service levels, but also provide the ability to correct or otherwise conform resources within the terms of the service level agreements.
As such, there exists a need for the active monitoring of REST web service activities without the computation and resource overhead of continuous monitoring techniques.